COVID-19 has exposed the financial vulnerabilities at both individual, corporate and government levels and therefore, collective efforts are required to support economic growth recovery and ultimately help to address socio-economic challenges in our country.

For Old Mutual, as a company that celebrates 100 years of operations in Namibia this year, we have learnt an enduring lesson that, Times change but what matters never will. We all aspire for a better life and improved livelihood of the most vulnerable.

This why our Corporate Social Initiatives focuses on education, skills development, financial wellbeing and community development which are well aligned to the key pillars of our country’s national development plans. Given the nature of our business, we consider ourselves to be a certain friend in uncertain time. Therefore, when COVID-19 hit Namibia in March this year, we committed to deliver on Old Mutual N$5 million pledge towards the nation-wide efforts to help address some of the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, in very specific targeted areas.

Part of the committed N$5 Million was a N$1 million that provided for food supplies for vulnerable people in our country. With additional internally mobilized funds for this purpose, I am pleased, Right Honorable Prime Minister, to announce that we have spent N$1.5 million and concluded the food supply roll-out to provide food supplies to 3 017 vulnerable people across all the 14 regions in our country.

As initially pledged, an amount of N$2,7 million was used to scale up COVID-19 testing capacity of which N$1.7 million was used to acquire testing equipment to broaden the scale of testing. The machines and testing kits were procured at a value of N$1.781 million and delivered to the National Institute of Pathology in April this year. The N$1 million was used to strengthen tracing capacity for effective tracing of COVID-19 exposed people. To that end, Old Mutual delivered 35 Dell laptops and 37 Samsung tablets to the Ministry of Health and Social Services in June 2020, procured at a total cost of N$998 030.46.

The final leg of the committed N$5 million is the N$1.3 million contribution to the National Disaster Fund geared towards the payment of allowances to temporary recruited medical professionals by the Government to assist on the frontlines against COVID-19 pandemic. This is the contribution we are pleased to officially hand over to you, Right Honourable Prime Minister, today.

In the same vein, Old Mutual placed customers at the centre of everything we do, to sustain and grow their prosperity. This is also why, following COVID-19 pandemic, we have provided premium relief support to severely affected customers in the form of additional and automatic premium holidays to over 4 000 customers. Equally, we extended premium contribution holidays to over 30 corporate funds.

We are deeply aware of the critical work being done by all health essential service workers across the country as they continue to serve, care and protect our nation during this challenging time. In fact, these healthcare workers not only form a critical part of the overall essential services in the community but they are equally our customers, families and friends.

With this support, Old Mutual thanks our frontline workers who are selflessly working to ensure the wellbeing of impacted Namibians everywhere, every day.

From our entire workforce to all our healthcare workers across the country, we say: WE ARE HERE FOR YOU!”